adrienmundi (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
adrienmundi) wrote2005-10-11 05:58 pm
adrienmundi) wrote2005-10-11 05:58 pm
weddings and marriage
This has been on my mind a lot lately, so I'm going to try and metaphorically trepenate myself.
Weddings make me distinctly uncomfortable. To me, they're like the ceremonial equivalent of shopping malls: the place where strict, rigid gender normativity is brutally revealed and reinforced. The whole thing hinges on perceived sex to my eyes, from who stands and who is walked down the aisle with an escort, to what closthing is considered appropriate for guests and/or participants. Normalization is in full force in lots of other ways, too (heteronormativity, questions about when others are getting married, usw), but it's the sexism that hits me hardest and first; I have a very hard time imagining attending one without feeling under assault and pained, not to mention hypocritical.
Marriage is tied up in this as well. I want to preface this next part by saying I'm a huge, fluffy sucker for romance, true love, and relationships in pretty much any adult shape or flavor. I will happily celebrate anyone's relationship who would want me to. But, marriage is not just celebrating relationships. From my perspective, it's an inherently unfair institution. Sure, part of that is sexism; marriage has been a cultural artefact for long enough for there to be often invisible assumptions about who does what in the marriage that tend to fall along the innie/outie lines. Some people resist this, or come to mutually agreeable compromises, but I think the pressure is always present (more from the outside than from inside, I suspect). It's also unfair that for marriages to be legitimate, and in most cases, legal, it has to have a matched set: one innie, one outie. Both of these things are horribly unfair.
But there are privileges* assigned to marriage that can only exist by those same priveleges being denied to other people (in a sense, the definition of privilege). There are legal rights, sure; most of these have been voluminously enumerated as one of the cases for extending marriage to innie/innie or outie/outie couplings. There are also, however, social privileges. Watch how people are treated who are married compared to those who are not. In many social situations, one of the first questions is "Are you married?" or "Is this your wife/husband?". Those who answer in the affirmative are graspable; those who do not are questioned, as if it's perfectly acceptable to ask of them, "Why aren't you normal?" (As an excercise, when was the last time you heard someone ask why someone else was married, as opposed to why they aren't?) In short, I believe marriage is privileged at the expense of every other possible kind of adult relationship.
I come to this as someone who is not easily categorized, and who doesn't want to be. I am with a partner with whom I intend to grow old and die, but we'll never be married, even if the categories were magically made elastic enough to encompass us and our relationship. As an unmarried, I can tell you that to the majority of others, my relationship is taken less seriously, is seen as less meaningful than those who have obtained social approval for their union. I admit I have a personal stake in this issue. I'm not attacking anyone, or telling anyone that their choices are invalid; I'm trying to talk my way through why I find weddings and marriage so problematic.
*Yes, that word again. I'm not sure I can write more than two paragraphs any more without it coming into play
Weddings make me distinctly uncomfortable. To me, they're like the ceremonial equivalent of shopping malls: the place where strict, rigid gender normativity is brutally revealed and reinforced. The whole thing hinges on perceived sex to my eyes, from who stands and who is walked down the aisle with an escort, to what closthing is considered appropriate for guests and/or participants. Normalization is in full force in lots of other ways, too (heteronormativity, questions about when others are getting married, usw), but it's the sexism that hits me hardest and first; I have a very hard time imagining attending one without feeling under assault and pained, not to mention hypocritical.
Marriage is tied up in this as well. I want to preface this next part by saying I'm a huge, fluffy sucker for romance, true love, and relationships in pretty much any adult shape or flavor. I will happily celebrate anyone's relationship who would want me to. But, marriage is not just celebrating relationships. From my perspective, it's an inherently unfair institution. Sure, part of that is sexism; marriage has been a cultural artefact for long enough for there to be often invisible assumptions about who does what in the marriage that tend to fall along the innie/outie lines. Some people resist this, or come to mutually agreeable compromises, but I think the pressure is always present (more from the outside than from inside, I suspect). It's also unfair that for marriages to be legitimate, and in most cases, legal, it has to have a matched set: one innie, one outie. Both of these things are horribly unfair.
But there are privileges* assigned to marriage that can only exist by those same priveleges being denied to other people (in a sense, the definition of privilege). There are legal rights, sure; most of these have been voluminously enumerated as one of the cases for extending marriage to innie/innie or outie/outie couplings. There are also, however, social privileges. Watch how people are treated who are married compared to those who are not. In many social situations, one of the first questions is "Are you married?" or "Is this your wife/husband?". Those who answer in the affirmative are graspable; those who do not are questioned, as if it's perfectly acceptable to ask of them, "Why aren't you normal?" (As an excercise, when was the last time you heard someone ask why someone else was married, as opposed to why they aren't?) In short, I believe marriage is privileged at the expense of every other possible kind of adult relationship.
I come to this as someone who is not easily categorized, and who doesn't want to be. I am with a partner with whom I intend to grow old and die, but we'll never be married, even if the categories were magically made elastic enough to encompass us and our relationship. As an unmarried, I can tell you that to the majority of others, my relationship is taken less seriously, is seen as less meaningful than those who have obtained social approval for their union. I admit I have a personal stake in this issue. I'm not attacking anyone, or telling anyone that their choices are invalid; I'm trying to talk my way through why I find weddings and marriage so problematic.
*Yes, that word again. I'm not sure I can write more than two paragraphs any more without it coming into play
Re: Questions, questions... lotsa blah blah blah...
I can sort of see where you're coming from about the wedding invitations thing. I often get invitations for weddings of cousins I haven't seen since I was little, and I'm torn between wanting to believe that family is just trying to be kindly inclusive, and feeling angsty at what I see as an order to send them a gift.
For clarity, what I was getting to about the refusal of legal priveleges was that the people in question would have a wedding, use the lingo, but not file paperwork (we'll ignore commonlaw marriage, here... not even sure that still legally exists in most places). I suppose it makes sense that the cultural bothers you more than the legal... many of the legal rights can still be obtained through other (more expensive, more troublesome) channels, but there's not really an alternative route to the social status.
Good that you don't want to tell people what they should do. That would grate. I generally don't either, except in the case of policy-makers.
For me, there were big reasons for getting a marriage license and certificate... health insurance, someone I trusted having the power to make decisions if I was unable to, property or contracts that had to be in one name or the other automatically reverting to the other person if anything happened to one of us, assumption that any children I have are legally his. These things could be obtained through alternate channels, but based on my cousin's experience, the sum of legal fees for these separate concerns (neverminding the insurance situation) would certainly have cost far more than the portion of the wedding we two personally paid for (possibly more than the whole thing, though I can't say that for sure)... more than we could have afforded at the time. Yeah, that's making use of privelege. Yeah, it makes me feel guilty and uneasy sometimes, especially given that I am close to other people who want the same and can't get it through the same cheap and easy means. But, I'm not sure that my not being legally married would actually serve to help them in any way.
As for getting married and having a wedding, I think that had a lot of importance to me based on family culture and tradition. For whatever reason, that was one part of family socialization that stuck: finding someone to spend your life with and having a public declaration and celebration of that milestone seemed like good and important things, at least for me. If I'd ended up with a girl, I'd probably have still felt the pull to have a wedding, marriage, etc.. But, I never really bought into a lot of the ideas put forth in our Culture (societal level, here, not family) about marriage and weddings... that they are The End, that it's a necessary rite of passage, that insane amounts of money should be spent on a wedding or diamonds or whatever, that people should be obligated to buy us an expensive gift, that a woman should be given away, etc.. Some level of tradition and continuity appeal to me, though. Our ceremony was kind of emblematic of those views and our relationship, I suppose... we took what traditions we liked, rejected others we didn't, compromised on some things, and arranged it all into something personally meaningful to the two of us.
Dunno if that adequately answers the questions... probably only a partial answer, anyway, but there some of it is. Feel free to ask more... I'm all about an open-minded exchange on the subject.